Developer Board, Ray Tracing in the Spotlight

LAS VEGAS – Imagination Technologies, perhaps best known for its PowerVR imaging hardware and software and MIPS processors, demonstrated its latest technology at the recent Consumer Electronics Show, including a developer board sporting a $65 price tag.

Tony King-Smith, EVP of marketing for the technology division of Imagination Technologies, gave RCR Wireless News an overview of the Creator CI20 developer board.

The board, which supports Raspberry Pi and other add-ons, uses a 1.2 GHz dual-core MIPS processor, a PowerVR graphics processing unit and can run a Linux or Android operating system.

"That low-cost board is extremely powerful and we're getting tremendous interest from the developer community," King-Smith said. "You don't need to have a lot of capital expense to do very exciting things."

Linux Foundation COO and VP of business development Mike Woster, said the board is "exciting for hobbyists and students with limited resources, as well as extremely promising for engineers and designers during development and beyond."

King-Smith also demonstrated the work Imagination Technologies is doing to bring advanced "ray tracing" to tablets. Ray tracing is an imaging process whereby a computer simulates the way light interacts with computer-generated visuals.

King-Smith, pointing to a display, said that while "all of this looks nice … you can still tell it's computer-generated. Ray tracing, in its purest form, can actually make it indistinguishable from photorealism."

He said current nonconsumer ray tracing applications, like the computer-generated images from "Avatar" or "Toy Story," was supported by server farms. Advancements, he said, will make the technology available on tablets in the next few years.